This invention relates to distributing one or more pieces of information in one or more forms to different types of destinations or resources such as printers, fax machines, e-mail boxes the world wide web, and pagers, for example using a delivery service system. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method for creating electronic packages containing information to be delivered, destinations to which the information is to be delivered, and delivery instructions, and then distributing the information to the various destinations.
There has been a recent proliferation of techniques by which information may be communicated from one place to another. For example, information in the form of a document file associated with a personal computer may be transmitted via a fax modem and telephone lines to a fax machine. Other examples are sending messages via a suitable wireless transmission system to a pager, sending e-mail to an e-mail address, and transferring information in the form of a document from a personal computer to a printer for printing a hard copy of the document. In each of these four examples, information is sent to a different destination type, namely a fax machine, a pager, and a printer. The communication possibilities have escalated even more due to networks of computers such as local area networks (LANs) or wide area networks (WANs) in which a user can access or share resources connected in the network, such as printers, fax modems, pagers, and e-mail boxes, for example. A single LAN or WAN user may be able to send information to any resource associated with the network or use the resources shared on the network to communicate to others around the world.
Although the proliferation of methods for transferring or communicating information represents a vast technological improvement in itself, the various communication possibilities also present problems to the user. The basis of the problems presented by the wide variety of communication techniques now possible is that each technique has been separately used, operated, and controlled.
For example, a LAN user might have wished to fax a document to a distant fax machine through a fax modem that the user could access. In that case, the user ran the software program controlling the fax modem and entered the instructions necessary to fax the desired document to the desired fax machine. If the user also wanted to print the document on a printer accessible via the network, the user had to run the software program used to control the printer, usually the document creating or word processing software, to send the document to the printer. Thus, generally each time a user wanted to send a document or information to a particular destination or resource, the user had to separately run the particular software that controlled the transmission process or resource. Also, the delivery of a particular document or information to a certain destination often required changing the format of the document to a format acceptable to the destination. This process of separately running multiple software products to transmit information to various destinations was time consuming and required that the user have knowledge of the software controlling each transmission or resource. Having to separately format the information for each destination also required that the user have knowledge of the format needed to ensure the information looked correct when it is was sent to the target devices.
Another problem with many individual or resource specific information transmitting or distributing techniques was that the user had little or no control over the delivery process. For example, to send a document to a resource such as a printer connected in a LAN, the user often had no way to control that the job printed at a certain time or to expedite the print job. Also, there was often no way for the user to know if the document was successfully printed. The user had to call someone at the printer location to manually confirm that the print job was successfully performed.